Music
I'm a music producer and DJ. My music has passed 300,000 streams across Spotify and SoundCloud, been played on BBC Radio 1, and had several plays on George FM, a national New Zealand station.
01About
Wellington, NZHi, I'm Joel.
I lead a platform team in Wellington. Outside work I run, train and make music.
- Role
- Platform & Infrastructure Lead
- At
- Starboard, defence tech
- Based
- Wellington, NZ
- Clouds
- GCP, AWS, Azure
- In infra since
- 2019
- After hours
- Running, fitness and music
02The short version
Fig. 01The short version
I'm a senior engineer at Starboard. I lead platform and infrastructure for maritime intelligence software used in 30+ countries.
I started on a support desk in Hastings in 2019. Since then I've automated a power grid upgrade, modernised AWS accounts for more than a dozen customers, built weather data pipelines at MetService, and joined Starboard as its first infrastructure hire. I wrote the plan, built most of the platform, moved production onto it, and hired the people who now run it with me.
Most days that means Kubernetes, Terraform and GitOps on GCP, after years on AWS and Azure. I also write TypeScript and Python, and I designed the just-in-time production access that got us through a defence customer audit.
Two things have my attention at the moment. One is mentoring: two of the interns I worked with are now associate engineers who own parts of the platform. The other is coding agents, and how they can plan an infrastructure change while a person still makes every decision. I write up what I learn here.
Skill stackHover to explore
Fig. 01 - Skill stackCloud
Cloud
I have seven years of experience designing, building and operating infrastructure across GCP, AWS and Azure. My work spans cloud foundations, secure access and cost optimisation, with a focus on making cloud environments easier for teams to manage.
- GCP
- AWS
- Azure
- Landing zones
- IAM
PathSince 2019 · GCP · AWS · Azure
Starboard
Platform & Infrastructure Lead
As the first dedicated infrastructure engineer, I designed and built Starboard’s internal Kubernetes platform for self-service application delivery, led the migration of production services onto it, and grew the function into a four-person team that I now lead.
2025 - now
MetService
DevOps Platform Engineer
I helped build a real-time weather data platform on Azure using Databricks, Spark and Delta Lake, with deployment pipelines, Terraform modules, APIs and tooling to validate it against the legacy system. I later built a multi-account AWS delivery pipeline and an aviation weather data pipeline.
2023 - 2025
AC3
DevOps Engineer
Worked as a consultant across multiple projects. I modernised AWS environments using CDK, Terraform and CloudFormation, built AWS Config compliance tooling, upgraded Kubernetes clusters, and hardened VM images to CIS benchmarks using Azure Image Builder. I also reduced a customer’s hosting costs by 30% and improved performance by 25%.
2022 - 2023
Red Hat, Synerty, Seekom, Tribe
Early roles
Started on a support desk, then moved into automation, including a power grid upgrade.
2019 - 2022
What I do outside
Running and fitness
I'm training for my second marathon.
03Toolbox
Toolbox
- GKE
- Argo CD
- Kargo
- Kyverno
- OPA
- Helm
- Terraform
- Workload Identity Federation
- GCP PAM
- Envoy Gateway
- Gateway API
- Cloud Armor
- Fabric FAST
- Grafana
- eBPF
- Claude Code